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Bleeding-Heart Republicans
The GOP Stands Up for Downtrodden Minority: The Super-Rich
The focus of the GOP's generosity is a true American minority: the richest one-tenth of one percent of our people. Living in penthouse ghettos like Manhattan's Upper East Side, this tiny minority of about 120,000 people (who have an average annual income of $8 million) would get some $3 million each over the next decade from the Republican proposal. Doesn't that just make your heart bleed with empathy?
This windfall will go to the most un-needy among us if the GOP gets Congress to renew the Bush tax cuts for the superrich. Yes, the same Republican lawmakers who have opposed even modest funding to keep schoolteachers and firefighters on the job are wailing that we should take hundreds of billions of dollars from our public treasury and hand them to some of the richest people on the planet.
What's at work here is the narcissistic psychosis of the privileged - the delusional belief that they are entitled to special treatment because they're ... well, they're rich and therefore consider themselves to be both superior and especially deserving.
This attitude was expressed in a recent letter to The New York Times by a guy with the rather foppish name of Mr. Standish Fleming. He deplored any effort to deny these special tax giveaways to the elite, declaring that such efforts "discriminate" against the minority of wealthy and "productive" members of our society, thus rending America's "social fabric of trust and respect."
Of all the crying needs in our country today, these Republicans are wringing their hands over the discrimination against the wealthy minority. Sometimes, I don't know whether to laugh or cry or go bowling!
This is one of those times.
Is it possible that these pampered ones and their congressional pamperers haven't noticed that "America's social fabric of trust and respect" has already been rended by three decades of policies knocking down the workaday majority? America is now in a Great Jobs Depression that already has lasted 10 years and continues to rage unabated across the land. This Depression has devastated our country's middle class.
Yet, it took two months and endless compromises this summer for Senate Democrats to woo a few Republican votes needed to pass even a weak and meek jobs bill to help deter mass firings of schoolteachers and firefighters by local governments. Pious, purse-lipped Republicans - who have eagerly backed Wall Street bailouts, needless wars and other budget-busting expenditures - demanded that other programs be cut as the price of saving these essential public-service jobs.
So, what program did our stalwart senators choose to loot? Food stamps!
Yes, even as millions of Americans are stuck in long-term, relentless unemployment, thus increasing the urgent need for family assistance, our well-fed, big-butted solons grabbed nearly $12 billion from the supplemental nutrition assistance program. This puts the "dumb" in dumbfounding!
Because of the economic collapse caused by the reckless greed of Wall Street bankers, there has been a 50 percent increase in the past two years in the number of Americans relying on food stamps. In the coming months, more and more people - including schoolteachers and firefighters - are going to lose their jobs, and many of them will need the helping hand that Congress has now so stupidly and callously withdrawn.
Instead of stealing funds from our country's essential food stamp program, Congress should get the money for its jobs bill by taxing the multibillion-dollar bonuses that Wall Street bankers are paying out to themselves. And if that's not enough money, cut the pay, pensions and health care freebies that congress-critters give to themselves - most of them need to go on a diet anyway.
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Show All"Congress should get the money for its jobs bill by taxing the multibillion-dollar bonuses that Wall Street bankers are paying out to themselves."
Of course they "should" -- even the best speakouters on our side, like Jim Hightower, are full of "should". But there seems to be no known way to motivate the Powers That Be to move in that direction. In fact, the pressure is going just the opposite way despite the president's recent mea culpa and acknowledgment that we folks out here are scared and hurting.
There is no way to motivate them. They literally do not care about us in the slightest degree.
Our only choice is to circumvent the current system. Outright rebellion equals prison, torture, death--and it may yet come to that. Indeed, most government behavior seems designed to provoke it--this is the motivation behind all the current media blather about "Western" terrorists, indistinguishable from your ordinary folks. This is why peace activists in Iowa are treated like child rapists--so long as we're not talking about U.S. citizens raping Iraqi children to get the parents to talk:
http://boingboing.net/2004/07/15/hersh-children-raped.html
I hope for a massive strike, where nothing gets done until it's solely for the public benefit. But I don't see that happening, either. The above-cited child rape should have done it, but here we are, I think 6 years later, and no one even mentions it.
If child-rape doesn't get us into the street, nothing will.
I fear we're simply allowing the cage to be built around us, and it will be generations before "real change" occurs.
The President has achieved precisely what he was hired to do. The money flows ever-upward, and our rights recede further into the bowels of the sewer. Winning the election will change nothing. Nor will losing. The corporate masters and their political servants will be just fine, either way.
And we're fucked, either way.
Sorry, but that's as cheery as I can make it as we cross the equinox and begin the three-month journey into darkness.
Cheers, anyway.
Hey, Jim, who voted to put the corporate shills into office and keep them there?
The people have voted for these give-a-ways to the super rich through their fairly elected representatives.
This policy is the will of the people. Don't you like democracy?
BULLSHIT! the vast majority of people want to tax the rich! and if you think that the congress is delivering on what actual people in the majority wants then you are either braindead or a troll -
probably both!
and democracy to the highest bidder with the lobbyists writing the bills isn't democracy - and in most democratic societies that is called BRIBERY.
but then again you were probably being tongue in cheek and I missed the joke!
No, you got it on the 1st try: Braindead Troll. Read some other posts. This toxic little vermin has been vomiting his racist spleen all over CD today. You can't argue w/him (authoritarians don't understand mature arguments), and you'll never make any of them any smarter. He's a barking dog, ignore him.
If the vast majority of people don't think that they can get rich, then they will scream for taxing the rich but since half of the people still believe that they too can get rich, they won't want to tax the rich. Ask an average American watching Donald Trump. They'll think that they can be as rich as him. Congress is delivering for the corporations and very wealthy caring less about what others want. In other words, Congress does what it wants regardless of the will of the people.
True enough, and if you don't believe it, remember the huge impact of good old Joe Six-Pack.
Today I drove behind _another_ $50,000 pick-up truck (F-150) with the ever-popular-in-Naples bumper sticker: Stop Socialism.
Mr. Hightower and the rest of us must directly attack the over-simplified slogan of the covertly-wealthy small businessman. Maybe we ought to have a bright red bumper sticker saying: Stop Capitalism, or, Stop Bleeding-Heart Republicans and back it up with rhetoric from the White House explaining very carefully and simply the parallel between Food Stamps and Tax Cuts for the Rich.
Sorry to say, most Americans are too dumb to comprehend the phrase, "Bleeding-Heart Republicans" unless we do it with bumper stickers and television sound bites.
Why isn't the bully pulpit being used?
That's what we'll go to our doom wondering. President Obama was elected because -- and only because -- he was an excellent public speaker and a lot of us hoped (hoped, mind you; I know I never unhesitatingly believed) that he would follow the FDR playbook and use the bully pulpit to go over the heads of the PTB.
He coulda been a contenda.
I say this on this site every six months or so but it seems to me that when he was elected, someone sat him down and said, "All that stuff you said to get elected . . . well, forget all that. Here's what you can REALLY do or say.
Remember when Nader took the heat for his comment that Obama needed toshow us whether he would be an Uncle Sam to our citizens or an Uncle Tom for the corporations? Kinda' prescient now, wasn't it?
Perhaps, after the election, 'they' -- meaning the intel community, MIC, Pentagon and the wealthy interests they represent -- sat Obama down and said, 'Look, you either do what you're told or you'll end up another JFK.' That would explain why he's reversed himself on so many of his positions.
I have also heard that the reason Obama isn't going after the Bush-Cheney crowd is due to a deal that was struck in the summer of 2008 -- the Bushites agreed to leave office peaceably if Obama promised them they would not be prosecuted. If that promise was not made, Bush would crack down and declare martial law, suspend the election over some trumped-up terrorist emergency, and dare the Dems to try and remove him from office. I don't know if this is true, but I wouldn't put it past them.
Might it be that the covertly-wealthy small businessmen are wanting to dismantle Social Security because they have not covered themselves or their employees by paying into it?
So much money passes "under the table" in America it should give as much pause as American cash going to Taliban protection for American convoys or to Xe and other "security" corporations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Might we "save" even more money by allowing Bush tax cuts to expire and by cutting these under the table arrangements? And we must get in their faces about cutting programs now deemed "socialism"!
You are right about the bleeding heart Republicans Mr. Hightower, that still doesn't mean that I am going to vote for Democrats. I am going to vote for either Green Party candidates or Social Democrats. Neither the Republicans or the Democrats deserve our support. If you vote for either wing of the procorporate party you are doing nothing more than serving the empire and voting against you and you'r families best interests!
It really is too bad that Mr. Hightower (like the majority of democrat illusionists) cannot be accurate in the use of his talent.
The vast majority of politicians in Washington worship at the altar of so-called "Free" Market Capitalism and their devotion is to the (as they see it) miracle of the "trickle down" prophesy of the Reagonomic Chapel.
Just keep leading the fools to the Clintonian Obama sculpting on the other side of the same altar and criticize the republican style because we MUST maintain the illusion that by looking at the altar from a different perspective we can believe that we are in a different church.
Of course, the real "miracle" is how the republicans can keep enlarging the coffers of the church when they are in the minority.
Boy, this new preacher and the choir sure are amazing! Maybe I should tithe?
NOT.
p.s. The title of this article is a pretty good description of what we call the "democrats."
‘Antinomianism’.
Tom, of Joshua Tree, CA, e-mailed Mike Malloy a gem relating to antinomianism. Mike read it on the air last night (September 22, 2010). Here is a partial quote from Tom’s e-mail:
“So how do we stop them from killing us all on the altar of their gods, unless we destroy their gods? We have to go after their gods; because that’s all those idiots will ever listen to.”
If you don’t subscribe to the Mike Malloy podcast, why not? He is absolutely the best spokesman we have on our side! Tom’s complete e-mail can be found about midpoint on Wednesday’s podcast.
Mike sometimes wonders aloud why the rich liberals (of course he knows that’s an oxymoron) don’t fund talk shows like his. The few times that Mike (and other progressive voices – i.e. Randi Rhoades) have been allowed on the air to answer The Spokesmen for Evil (who are inundated with obscene amounts of money by our Owners to lie and misinform 24-7), they have outscored them 3-1 (an off-the-top-of-my-head example, but very close to actual statistics). Of course, the radio station then takes them off the air, or promptly changes their format to some other form of pabulum for the masses. (Who, by law, owns the airways?)
Go to his site (mikemalloy.com) and check out the tons of letters he receives from the immoral, unpatriotic others. This plethora of letters comes from people who are uniformly sick, who use crude obscenities to threaten harm to, and the lives, of Mike, his wife and his 6-year-old daughter. Many of them seem to have found an alternate provider of ‘professional’ help.
I have referred to THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO; the story is not far-fetched in its portrayal of evil. Fiction allows truth.
We have met the enemy and he is – well, he 'wears', at least, some Brand of Religion as his raison d'être to destroy the United States, and as a bonus to destroy an earth which is sustainable to life.
Ps. I’d give odds that Tom of Joshua Tree is reading this now (although, I have no idea who you are). Absolutely brilliant, Tom
$8,000,000.00 a year and it is still not enough. They could give away 90% of that and STILL live like a god damned king. But it is not enough. Just. Not. Enough. Imagine winning the lottery every single year of your life. But, it is just not enough. There is never enough. Words fail.
Key Largo... [Bogart] What is it you want, Johnny?" [Edward G. Robinson/ Johnny Rico]Eh.. I don't know what I want... [Bogart] I'll tell you what you want, you want MORE. [E.G.R.]Yeah, THAT's what I want, I want MORE. [Bogart] And you'll never be satisfied will you? [E.G.R.} No, I'll always want more!... Welcome to the Johnny Rico Culture.
dkshaw: People like that have a mental deficiency like any hoarder does. But instead of hoarding animals, or junk in their house or apartment, they hoard money. So like the person who has 60 dogs, but has the uncontrollable urge to get one more, the money hoarders will want another million even if they already have 60. They simply cant control themselves and will do ANYTHING to get it.
Until hoarding more money than you will ever use in a lifetime, at the detriment to others, is viewed as a deviant behavior, 95% of us are screwed.
It really is a mental illness isn't it?
It is a pathological condition, and it goes untreated because many of those who might conduct the treatment are seized by the same beast of avarice and lust for the power money brings.
Paranoid Pessimist September 23rd, 2010 9:26 pm
"All that stuff you said to get elected . . . well, forget all that. Here's what you can REALLY do or say…..”
“P-P”,
I have sung the same tune to my family and friends for almost a year now. With the dead silence from those folks I meet in reply to my theory; I am relieved that we are tuned in on the same wave length, Great, 'birds of a feather..'?
Absolutely! Obama not only had the silver tongue,he was of an ethnic minority and had the pizazz to carry it off.
They sat him down and said,“You will get the nomination – for now Hilary will be the Secretary of State (other options for 2012) and in office for you will surround yourself with the illustrious members of previous administrations and then… here's what you can REALLY do or say”.
I've always wondered about that myself; I think you might be right.
If they will not pay for a prosperous society by resdistributing a small portion of their wealth, then they obviously expect us to quietly turn into a third world country. We peasants don't have it in us to revolt.
If one 'earns' 8 million a year and desires to give away 90% it becomes very difficult to do so, and not out of greed. Giving away 90% leaves one with $800,000. But then the tax laws allow one to 'write off' that $7.2 million gift, and one receives a tax refund of around 1/3 of that $7.2M, or around $2.4 million!! They are so wealthy they can't even give away 90% if they TRY. This is sick, sick, sick. BUT ITS STILL NOT ENOUGH. One simply cannot survive on only $8 Million a year.
Congress needs to take away the subsidies that are handed to the fossil fuel companies, the coal and nuclear companies. They are making a profit and can pay their own way. The renewables are not getting a level playing field and cannot get the traction that they need to take over.
I learned all this from an article on Sept 20 in NYtimes "As Europe kicks the coal habit" European Union goal is 20% renewables by 2020 and they are doing it by shutting off the subsidies to fossil energy including giving out pink slips to miners-- yes there is a lot of unemployment but it is NOT all about jobs-- it is also about our planet!
Government could make some pretty cash by saving these handouts to the rich industries .
@ metamorph, it would also help if Congress stopped allowing corporations to write-off the expense of moving their factories overseas and re-imposed tariffs on imported items, as well as limit the 'lifespan' of a corporation to 40 years and required them to state how their business served the public, as was done for most of the 19th century. I won't hold my breath.
I have a few hundred bucks and thats about it. Anyone wants it can have it. I'm done. I don't give a shit. I'm done worrying, I'm done caring. Fuckit. Actually we are all done. Stop writing. Put your body on the line. Won't matter. See ya.
Money...money...moooooney...!!! Yes siree Bob it is the blood of America. Billy Boy Clinton said it best...it IS the economy STUPID.... And we are the stupid ones, for believing life and humanity is all about money...money...money...money and money... While our elected representative is getting a blow job in the Oval Office he tells everybody...Its all about money folks ! What have any of them done for decades but line their pockets and create benefits for themselves at the expense of the public. But they now have stepped over the line once again and are killing the goose because the goose is simply a human resource. An easily swayed and stupid tool to be used for the benefit of the employer...or not. After all there are many resources elsewhere on the planet. No sense wasting money on American ones. Aren`t we all "going global"? There is no need to molly coddle Americans...the same resource is available for a dime a dozen in other countries....We DO want FREE TRADE !!!! THINK GLOBALLY FOLKS ! But that crap from somewhere else when its cheaper. We are WHERE WE ARE BECAUSE WE WANT TO BE THERE !!! It is by the consensus of the ruled that allows the rulers to do what they do. SHUT UP ALREADY WITH THE COMPLAINTS ! (or get involved if you have time after the football game and TV and work & family and sleep) Or....let them continue to do what they have been doing...